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Are Blue Zones a Mirage?

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Tuesday, April 1, 2025

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket CastsDo you want to live forever? How about to at least 105? You’ve probably heard of blue zones—amazing places where people live disproportionately longer and healthier lives. From Okinawa, Japan, to Ikaria, Greece these regions of the world have captured the imagination of an aging world.Most of the advice that researchers have extracted from these places are what most people consider just common sense. Don’t stress too much or eat too much or drink too much alcohol. Make sure to eat plants and legumes, build community, and protect familial relationships.But while this might be fine advice, at least one researcher is skeptical that the underlying research holds up.On this week’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with Dr. Saul Newman, a researcher at the University of Oxford and University College London, who seeks to debunk the blue-zones research with studies of his own. His critics accuse him of writing a “deeply flawed” paper, keeping the debate active. (You can read their arguments here.)Newman’s argument is pretty straightforward. The documentation certifying people’s births is really hard to verify, and there are many documented cases of age fraud. Some of that fraud is intentional—people claiming to be older than they are for cultural or financial benefit—and some is unintentional, thanks to shoddy recordkeeping or researchers getting fooled or making mistakes.While this debate rests on methodological questions that we can’t fully explore in this episode, Newman’s provocation raises important questions about how much we should trust some of the most popular ideas in longevity research.The following is a transcript of the episode:Jerusalem Demsas: According to Our World in Data, in 1800, not a single region of the world had a life expectancy longer than 40 years. By 2021, the global average life expectancy was more than 70 years. It’s still not enough. We want to live longer, healthier lives. What can we do about it?You’ve probably heard of “blue zones,” regions of the world where researchers claim to have found disproportionate numbers of people living into their hundreds. The first such Eden was Sardinia, Italy. Then Okinawa, Japan, and Loma Linda, California, among others.But in recent years, despite the prevalence of cookbooks and diets and Netflix docuseries about these places explaining how to learn from the lifestyles of people living in these regions, something hasn’t quite added up.My name’s Jerusalem Demsas, I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.Saul Newman is a longevity researcher at the University of Oxford and the University College London who has become convinced that this research doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. First, when he looks at the regions of the world designated blue zones, they just don’t look like particularly healthy places. The blue-zones theory claims that people live longer in these regions because of their naturally healthy lifestyles, but what Saul finds when he looks at these regions is low literacy, low incomes, high crime, and even short life expectancies relative to the national average. But even more tellingly, according to his research, introducing official birth certificates suspiciously coincides with a steep 69 to 82 percent fall in the number of people claiming to be over 109. A number of other statistical oddities indicate that the people claiming to be over 100 years old are either misleading us or are misled themselves.Here at Good on Paper, several of the studies we discuss are preprints, which means they haven’t finished going through the formal review process that can take years. We do this because waiting to discuss studies until after they’ve been through that process would mean missing out on tracking important live debates. But I say all that now because, while Saul is convinced of his findings, this is not yet a settled debate. The proponents of blue zones are fighting back and claim he “omits or misunderstands” how rigorous their methods are.But to hear his perspective on the science of longevity and why he doesn’t trust the blue-zones research, I’m excited to have Saul joining us today.Saul, welcome to the show!Saul Newman: Pleasure to be here.Demsas: So why do people die?Newman: Why do people die? Well, this is a fascinating question, and many of the people in aging research sort of still admit that we really don’t understand the fundamentals. So it’s actually a surprising thing that something so obvious is something we’re still figuring out. The best approximation we have at the moment is that we look at the inverse question: Why continue to live? What is the sort of evolutionary advantage of continuing to live?There are two main thoughts. One I favor, and another that’s quite out of date. The out-of-date one is this sort of Darwinian idea that we exist just to make children. And this is the idea that has the problems, because if we exist just to make children, you get stuck with all sorts of awkward questions, like why does menopause evolve? Why evolve not to have children? Why evolve to help other people at the cost of your own reproduction? And we know all these things happen, and they happen across the animal kingdom, which brings us to the second idea.And the second idea is that we evolve to pass on genes. And because we are related to so many different people, there are a lot of ways to pass on genes, including indirect ways where we help others. This is a sort of still-developing field in answering that question of why we exist, essentially. And it’s a very exciting one because it can explain things like the evolution of menopause, where we’re taking care of grandchildren.But it can also potentially explain a lot of traits that are very difficult to analyze. Traits like homosexuality don’t make sense in this sort of cruel, hard Darwinian sense of, Oh, you’re just a baby factory. But there is a potential to explain them using inclusive fitness. I mean, that said, there was also the flip-side argument to that: Why do I need to justify myself in terms of evolutionary theory in order to exist? Well, of course you don’t. So it’s a very difficult debate to get through, but it’s also an open question at this point.Demsas: What exactly is happening, though, when you die? Let’s say you don’t get an illness, right? Like, we know what happens when someone dies of a stroke or has a heart attack or has cancer or some other kind of long-running illness. But if you are just a generally healthy person—you’re in your 80s, or you’re in your 90s—what’s happening to your body?Newman: It is slowly degenerating, in functional terms. So this is, you know, often very hard to measure, because you have to define what the function of your body is to say, you know, how it’s degenerating, but there are sort of obvious signs. So your metabolic function declines with age. Obvious things, like your physical capacity to run a hundred meters, for example, declines with age. Mental capacity does decline, but it can be much slower. And you know, I think that’s really fascinating, because if you look at, for example, the rankings of top chess players, they decline, but they decline extremely slowly. But essentially, there’s this sort of general systemic decline as you get older in terms of how well you can function.Demsas: There’s a paper that I know that you wrote about this idea of, you know, as you get older, of course, your likelihood of death increases as you age. But there was a hypothesis that perhaps at a certain point, the rate at which you were likely to die kind of leveled off. So if you made it to 80, if you made it to 90—yes, your likelihood of dying every year was still, you know, elevated relative to a younger person, but it no longer was increasing significantly. What happened with that hypothesis?Newman: Well, this touches on the best way we have to measure age and aging, and the sort of functional decline is increases in the mortality rate, because once you hit about age 40 or 35, your odds of dying double at a sort of fixed clockwork rate.Demsas: Wait—what year was that?Newman: Around 35 to 40. It depends a little bit because—Demsas: Okay, great. Just logging that. (Laughs.)Newman: Yeah. It starts to decline earlier, but it’s obscured by something called the “accident hump.” And this is basically, like, what you do when you’re a teenager, right? There’s a big bump in mortality caused by, you know, cars running into trees or jumping off of buildings into swimming pools or whatever it happens to be. But this clockwork doubling means that your mortality, your odds of dying, double usually around every eight years, and there’s really nothing we can do about that.We can change the baseline, but every eight years, your odds of dying will double and double and double until you reach old age. And so in old age, there’s a hypothesis that mortality rates stop getting worse with age, and therefore that aging rates kind of stop or at least slow down considerably. Now, it doesn’t mean that things are getting better. You end up in this sort of Russian-roulette scenario where it’s a “see if your odds of dying flatten out.” And essentially, you’re playing Russian roulette every three months in terms of your mortality risk.And what does that mean in terms of human lifespan? So it means something very interesting. It means that there’s no actual limit to how long you can play roulette without losing. You know, there’s a probabilistic sort of cap where eventually you are going to lose.Demsas: Yeah, unless you’re the luckiest person alive.Newman: Exactly. So there’s nothing per se ruling out a run of good numbers. But the problem here is that this idea is something that has been fought over for 50-odd years and has not been resolved, because it may be that your odds of dying do keep doubling and doubling and doubling until they hit the odds of dying that equal to one, right? So this is what I call the “maximum survivable age.” And it’s not clear to scientists which of those two was correct—whether we strike a maximum survivable age, where we can’t possibly live older than this age, or whether we reach a sort of grim Russian-roulette scenario.Demsas: But life expectancy has improved remarkably over the 20th century. I mean, we’re seeing, you know, people with average lifespans of late ’70s in many developed nations, and rates of child mortality have declined significantly. So it seems like there’s a lot that policy, development, changes in public-health strategies can do to improve lifespan.Is it your sense that—I mean, you just kind of brought up this idea of a maximum survivable age. Is it your perception that there is a number—there is a threshold at which, despite all of these things that you can do to make yourself healthier, to make yourself better, the genetic selection that might exist over generations, there’s just not a chance that humans are gonna live to be 300, 400, etcetera?Newman: Well, in 2016, I waded into this debate because, like I said, there are two sides. And one of the sides had published an idea that there was this hard limit to maximum lifespan. And they published it in one of the most elite scientific journals there is. And I realized they had made colossal mistakes in their analysis—really just fundamental mistakes. They had rounded off most of their data to zero. They had accidentally deleted everyone who died in May and June, and just really made a complete mess of it. But they had argued for one case, and this case was that there’s a limit to how long you can live, a single limit.I had another group come along and argue the opposite. Now, the opposite was this Russian-roulette scenario. The problem was that they had done something even worse, because they had taken everybody in Italy over the age of 105 and used them to build this sort of flattening-out curve. And when they had made this curve, they needed to say what it was flattening out from. So they needed to say, Well, what’s the normal midlife probability of death, and how fast does it get worse? What it boiled down to is that they had picked out the only estimate from earlier life-mortality models that gave them a flattening-out result.So they had 861 options, and they chose the only option that gave them a significant result. So here I was, in the middle of a very vitriolic and long-running debate, saying that both camps were wrong. And I think both camps are wrong, because if you take that maximum survivable age and you estimate it, it doesn’t converge to a single value mathematically. And so in plain language, what that means is that if you grow up in a different environment, your maximum survivable age is different. And it moves over time, really clearly moves over time. So there is not one limit to human life. There is, at best, a smorgasbord of limits that depend on where you grew up, what population you’re in.Demsas: So essentially, there is a maximum survivable age, but it will differ based on the environmental and policy choices that are being made at that time. And so I guess that then the question just becomes, like, how much can you really do on environmental factors?So I want to get to this question about this theory of blue zones, which I think has become very popular. I mean, there’s been, you know, a popular book, a Netflix docuseries. It has inspired tons of attention.There are regions of the world where people have claimed to live remarkably long lives—past 80, even past 100—at rates higher than you would expect just based on if it was just distributed normally: places like Okinawa, in Japan; Loma Linda, California; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Sardinia, Italy; Ikaria, Greece. What was originally the evidence for the idea that these places were unusually good for long life?Newman: Well, the original evidence was rather amusing, actually, because like everything else in extreme-age research, there’s only one data source for human ages, and that’s documents. You know, you have government documents or informal documents that say, I’m this old. But the amusing factor was that the first blue-zone study found a bunch of people within Sardinia that seemed to be living a long time. They didn’t measure anyone outside of Sardinia. They decided that this was a global outlier for extraordinary ages, and they thought that incest, that people sleeping with each other was making this island—Demsas: I’ve never heard this. (Laughs.)Newman: It’s extraordinary. It doesn’t make it to the documentary—Demsas: —to the Netflix docuseries. (Laughs.)Newman: —for a very good reason. Yeah. I mean, there’s nobody making this lifestyle recommendation, I hope. (Laughs.)Demsas: Dear God.Newman: It’s kind of amazing. And that was the start of the blue zones.So, you know, I sort of vaguely knew about this idea while I was getting involved in this fight between the plateau people and the people who think there’s a limit to human life. And, you know, I sort of thought of it as an amusing aside, but as time went on, it became less and less amusing, more and more concerning—like, starkly concerning. And the reason is that everything in these studies is based on looking at documents and saying, Oh, they’re consistent.Demsas: You mean, like, birth certificates?Newman: I mean birth certificates. So there are a lot of problems with that, that really came out of the woodwork over time because, you know, it’s on paper.But when I started looking into these extreme-age cases, it really snowballed. Everything snowballed in a way that completely destroyed the idea and the underlying data of the blue zones. And effectively, you know, people are just believing their own fairy tales here. This really, you know, goes beyond cases, though, because early on in the investigation, I discovered that Japan, where it was claimed Japan had among the world’s best evidence for birth records. And in 2010, it turned out that 82 percent of the people over the age of 100 in the country were dead.Demsas: And was it pension fraud, or what?Newman: It was not pension fraud. It was the remarkable fact that in Japan, the household has to register your death, and if you are the last person in the household and you are dead, how do you do that?Demsas: Oh, wow.Newman: So they had, like, literally hundreds of thousands of people who had died in World War II or had died subsequently, and who were just getting older on paper, including the oldest man in Tokyo and the oldest woman in Tokyo.Demsas: Were they paying them, like, Social Security?Newman: Oh, yes.Demsas: Like, what was happening? Where was the money going?Newman: Well, in the case of the oldest man in Tokyo, the money was going to the family. And he was an extraordinary case that kicked off this investigation because—so there’s a sort of week in Japan where there’s a respect for the aged [day], and in preparation, city officials in Tokyo had gone looking for the oldest man. And eventually, they found out that the oldest man was in Tokyo, but he’d been dead in his apartment for 30 years, and his family were living in the apartment. And the oldest man in Tokyo had been steadily collecting his pension checks.Now, what’s extraordinary about that is that his paperwork was perfectly in order. Like, if you handed their paperwork to a demographer, they would not be able to see anything wrong with it. I mean, it’s not like you die and automatically a form pops out in the central bureaucracy, right? There’s no actual way to know.So it turned out that most extreme-old-age data was undetected errors, and this happened in every blue zone.Demsas: So you went through all the blue zones and saw the same pattern?Newman: I went through all the blue zones. The same thing happened. In Greece, at least 72 percent of the people in Greece who were over age 100 were collecting their pension checks from underground. And what’s remarkable about that is they had just passed a government audit, despite being dead. They passed a government audit in 2011, and in 2012, the government turned around and said, Actually, all those people were dead.Demsas: So walk me through this a little bit, because I think there’s a few different arguments that you’re making here. One is that there are places where it’s quite difficult to know what’s happening with the population, because there’s [a situation] like what you mentioned in Japan, where the reporting of death is happening in a method where you actually can’t validate, when the oldest person in a household has died.And then there’s a second strand of things, which is that people are actively committing fraud because of pensions and Social Security or other sorts of welfare benefits. And then there’s a third, which is just that these documents are not consistent or good, and so when demographers are trying to do this kind of research, they’re ending up having to rely on pretty shoddy documentation or to make broad claims.So how much of this is happening in each place? Like, what do you think is most prevalent?Newman: We don’t know what’s most prevalent. I mean, this is actually part of the problem: that we can see when an error has happened, but if we have documents in front of us that look good, we don’t know if they’re in error or not. And this pattern repeats itself. So there are many, many ways. There’s a whole layer cake of different methods by which you can screw up someone’s age.Like you said, you can just write it down wrong at the start. There was a case where the world’s oldest man was actually just his younger brother, and they just swapped documents. It’s completely undetectable, and it’s happened three times. And there are other cases where there’s active pension fraud. I mean, there’s also cases where you just have someone who is illiterate and has picked up the wrong documents. The list goes on and on and on.But the point is that demographers keep validating these people, and then decades—or even in one case, a century later—find out that they aren’t who they say they are. And that process is pretty much random. So you have to ask yourself, you know, what happens to a field over the course of more than a century when the data can only be checked for being consistent? You can’t actually tell if it’s true?And I think it really set up this extraordinary disaster where not only are the blue zones based on data that doesn’t make sense; we actually have this sort of fundamental problem in looking at the oldest people within our society. Blue zones are an exemplary case of this, but it’s more general.So to give you an example, health in the blue zones was poor before, during, and after they were established. Even in America, at least 17 percent of people over the age of 100 were clerical errors, missing, or dead—at least 17 percent. Many of them just did not have birth certificates. And we have no way of knowing. Like, it’s not as if I can take a person into a hospital, and they can put them into a machine, and it tells me how old they are.Demsas: Cut their arm off and count the rings (Laughs.)Newman: Exactly. The old pirate joke. You cut the leg off and count the rings. You can’t do that.Demsas: Yeah.Newman: And that means we are just taking all of this evidence at face value. Normally, that would be fine. Right? And this is where I’m going to apologize for talking numbers. But this is a theoretical result I came up with in 2018.Let’s imagine you have 100,000 people who are 50, really 50. Like, they’ve got their documents, everything. And then you have an extraordinarily low rate of error in which you take 100 40-year-olds, and you give them documents to say they’re 50. If you do that, normally you’d expect, Oh, I can just ignore this. My statistical model will take care of it as noise. But something happens instead that is extraordinary, because those 40-year-olds are, like I said, less than half as likely to die than the real data. So your errors have a lower rate of dying and being removed from the population than your real data—Demsas: Wait—sorry. Can you explain that? I don’t understand.Newman: So you remember: I told you about the clock where your mortality rate doubles every eight years? That means if, let’s say—and I call them “young liars.” If my young liars are eight years younger, their odds of dying day to day are half. So the errors have half the mortality rate of the real data. Every eight years, the percentage of errors doubles, and by the time you get to 100, every single person or almost every single person is an error.So you can’t ignore these tiny error rates. It doesn’t matter what country you’re in. It doesn’t matter where you are. You can’t just pretend they don’t exist, because they build up in this weird, nonlinear way over time, and it means that you would actually mathematically expect all of the oldest people in the world to be fake. So, you know, I’ve published this in a scientific journal. No one’s ever been able to argue the math, but they do not want to face up to sort of the repercussions of this.Demsas: Yeah. Part of this is very familiar to me. I don’t have a birth certificate. I was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and the only document I have about my birth and parentage is a baptismal certificate, where I’m pretty sure it was filled out by a member of the church that I was baptized into. I’m not joking: It’s written in teal ink.We were asylum seekers here. I’m, like, taking this to the State Department. I’m like, I swear to God, my father is my father. You literally have to give me a passport. I’m a citizen here. And it was such—it was awful. It was such a hassle. And then—now I’m getting off topic here, but—my brother had to get a DNA test to prove that our parents were his parents in order to get his driver’s license eventually, and his passport. So I’m very familiar with this.And there’s another phenomenon—which, I mean, I don’t know if this is something that you’ve seen in your research—wherein some cultures and communities, of course, being older is, like, quite an advantage. And so there will be people who you’re like, I know how old you are, but you are telling everyone you are 10 to 15 years older than you are. Have you seen this in your research?Newman: All the time. Yeah, I mean, constantly. There was a study in the BBC a couple of months ago where they looked at heart age. And this is a National Institute on Aging–funded study on people in the rainforest, right? And they say, We don’t have any idea how old we are. And the headline is, Oh, these people have really young hearts for their age. You know, they don’t know their age. They’re literally telling you, We are making it up.And, you know, if you have any doubts about the blue zones, there used to be something called the “longevity zones” that predates the blue zones. It was put out by National Geographic in exactly the same way. It had exactly the same hallmarks of, Oh, you live in a mountainous region that’s very remote, and you eat yogurt and vegetarian diets.And it was exactly what you’re saying. These people gave status to village elders, so people were inflating their ages to an extraordinary degree. They were saying, I’m 122. And that’s all it was. You know, this was three regions across the world: Soviet Georgia, where apparently yogurt was the secret; the Vilcabamba Valley, in Ecuador; and the Hunza Valley, in Pakistan. These were the blue zones, and every single case was based on rubbish recordkeeping. And, you know, it just seems to be that’s exactly what’s happened again.[Music]Demsas: After the break: Even if blue zones aren’t real, does that really change how we think about living longer?[Break]Demsas: The thing I’m wrestling with when I engage with this, because, you know, you have published this work; you’ve written about it in the Times and other places. But the fundamental idea that there are locations that are better for people’s lifespans seems not overturned by this, right?Like, we know that location matters a lot for health outcomes, air pollution in particular. It feels like there’s a new paper every other week showing that there’s massive impacts of air pollution on life expectancy, on cognitive functioning, on general health. Is the fundamental concept that there are certain places where people are going to live longer still one that we should be putting more research into?Newman: I think that’s not controversial. But I also think it’s very well understood, for exactly the reasons you say. There’s a study every week on average life expectancy. And what’s striking about this is that those places are very different from the places that get extreme life expectancy.So I basically took a sample of 80 percent of the world’s 110-year-olds and most of the world’s 105-year-olds, and looked at their distribution within countries. So I’m sitting in London right now. And in all of England, the place with the best rate of reaching 105 was the single poorest inner-city suburb with the single fewest number of 90-year-olds.So those two things—where it’s good to live, on average, and where it’s good to reach extreme old age—were exactly the opposite. This is like saying Flint, Michigan, is the healthiest place in the U.S.A. No shade on Flint, Michigan. The government is really the cause of this, but it does not make any sense. It fundamentally doesn’t make any sense. And it gets even worse when you start looking at the details.So the single U.S. blue zone is Loma Linda. I mean, the CDC measured Loma Linda for lifespan. They measure it, and it is completely and utterly unremarkable.Demsas: I’m not, you know, deeply reporting in the longevity space here, but the way that you have talked about your interactions with some of these authors makes me think it’s an especially contentious field. Why has it kind of remained so difficult to sort of overturn this popular narrative around blue zones?Newman: Well, it makes a lot of money.Demsas: Yeah.Newman: It’s really that simple. I mean, there are multiple best-selling cookbooks, you know. And I’d like to point out, of course: Don’t take your health advice from cookbooks. Its really sort of needs reinforcing every now and again. (Laughs.) But, you know, if you really had a cure for aging, you’d be winning the Nobel Prize.Demsas: You wouldn’t be writing a cookbook? (Laughs.)Newman: You would not be writing a cookbook. You wouldn’t be on late-night television, you know, making a sales pitch. You’d just be like, I want my Nobel Prize. I have a cure for all diseases. Where’s my money? It’s really fundamental.But there is another aspect to this in that a lot of research careers are built on examining the oldest old, and even more research careers are built on just assuming that birth-certificate ages are correct. And to show that they’re not correct in an undetectable fashion on such a massive scale threatens a lot of people’s research careers.Demsas: But part of the thing that I find interesting about the blue zone’s recommendations is that a lot of them are things that are just straightforwardly good advice, right? Move naturally. Have a sense of purpose. Stress less. Don’t eat too much. Eat beans and legumes. Have community. Put your family first. The only one that I think is potentially not actually good is: Drink alcohol in moderation. But the rest of them are generally associated with good health to different extents and, you know, with longevity to different extents.I guess, like, what drove you to become so interested in pushing back on this narrative, given that the advice that people are getting is generally still, like, you know, good health advice? Like, you probably should do most of these things if you’re not already.Newman: Well, I think the problem is the way in which the people in these regions are really kind of culturally being exploited. Because they don’t bear any connection to what actually happens in the blue zones. And I think that was what really drove it home for me, is that you have this sort of flavor of some guy who turns up for a few weeks, looks around, decides it’s the ikigai, and goes home. And if you actually go to the government of Japan, they’ve been measuring Okinawa, for example, since 1975. And every single time they’ve measured Okinawa, it has had terrible health. It has been right at the bottom of the pile.Demsas: Wow.Newman: I’ll take you through some statistics that were robustly ignored by people in selling these blue-zones ideas. Body mass index is measured in Okinawa and compared to the rest of Japan, and it’s measured in over-75-year-olds. So if you go back to 1975, that’s people born 1900 or before, and they measure how heavy they are. They have been last every year, by a massive margin.And then you look at the next claim. So that sort of knocks a hole in the “move naturally” claim. The “move naturally” claim also has this sort of idea that people grow gardens in the blue zones, right? The government of Japan measures that, and they are third to last out of 47 prefectures, after Tokyo and Osaka, where everyone lives in a high-rise. They don’t grow gardens. And we’ve known that since the beginning of records.And then you look at the idea that they eat plants. It seems really noncontroversial. But people in Okinawa do not eat their veggies. And we know this because we ask them. They’re last in the consumption of root vegetables, last in the consumption of leafy vegetables, last in the consumption of pickled vegetables. They’re third from the top in other raw meat. You know, they eat 40 kilograms of meat a year, at least, which is way above the global and national average. And even sweet potato—sweet potato is on the front of the Netflix documentary, these purple sweet potatoes—they are last for sweet potato consumption out of all the 47 prefectures of Japan.Demsas: Wow. Okay.Newman: And they always have been. There’s another idea that, you know, they have a sense of belonging, that they belong to a faith-based community. They’re 93.4 percent atheist. They’re third to last in the country, and it is a very atheist country. So the problem is that none of these claims have any connection to reality whatsoever.Demsas: Yeah.Newman: And it’s been sitting in the open for decades.Demsas: Have you become a lot more cynical about scientific research as a result of this?Newman: Oh, I mean, absolutely. It’s extraordinary, the sort of cognitive dissonance that goes on. And really, I mean, all of these claims just have no connection to reality. And you see this sort of sad thing playing out with the locals, where a beach resort will get built. People will fly in for three days, and they’re still sitting there going, like, Why don’t we have a hospital? Why are we all still poor?You know, just basic social problems get overlooked because of this. So yeah, it has made me much more cynical, because these, I guess you would call them “lumps and bumps,” should have been obvious right from the point when someone said incest was good for living a long time.Demsas: So, like, I mean, preregistration helps reduce a lot of issues in social science. There’s also been increasing attempts to subject, you know, big findings, important findings to replication by various groups and individuals.I mean, is there something fundamental that you think needs to happen differently in terms of how reputable journals accept new findings? Do you think that all the data needs to be open? What needs to happen here to prevent these sorts of problems in the future?Newman: In short, the answer is: really a lot.Demsas: Yeah.Newman: The slightly less short answer is that the core of science is reproducibility. It is the core idea. And these results are not reproducible. And it’s not just that they’re not reproducible. After 20 years, nobody has published the underlying data. And there needs to be a much heavier emphasis on replication in science and on testing claims—especially profitable claims—before they’re just thrown out into the open.Because, you know, I find it amazing. This is something that was discussed at an elite level at the World Economic Forum. Now, we cannot have a cookbook-based piece of lifestyle advice governing global health. So we need to really rejig the—I mean, first, the level of skepticism in science needs to go up considerably. And second, we need to really start hitting back on papers that need to be retracted, papers that need to be removed from the scientific record because they do not replicate or because, you know, like the first two—the studies I pointed out here—because they’re based on extremely questionable choices.Demsas: So most people listening to this will have heard of this topic before, but have you found anything that indicates it’s been especially influential in public health in that policy makers are taking it quite seriously as a way of trying to push different nonvalidated recommendations?Newman: Yes. I mean, the presentation at the World Economic Forum is really a low point, an extraordinary low point. But I think what is, like I said, more troubling is that you have an entire machinery of public health here that didn’t spot how completely wrong this is. In retrospect, it’s so wrong that everybody’s sort of giggling. But it’s been 20 years of this being perhaps the most popular idea in demography.And so I get worried about this because I’ve just completed a new study. And in this new study, I have taken every single 100-year-old in the world and analyzed where they’re from and what countries attain the age of 100 at the highest rates. And to do this, I took United Nations data contributed by every government on Earth, in good faith, with the best efforts at data cleaning—both by the governments and by the UN. And the places that reach 100 at the most remarkable rates don’t make any sense.Malawi, which is one of the 10 poorest countries on Earth, is in the top 10, and it’s in the top 10 routinely. You know, Western Sahara, which is a region that does not have a government, is one of the best places in the world for reaching 100, according to the UN. I mean, that’s fundamentally absurd. And it’s fundamentally absurd that it has been 70 years that this data has been produced for, and nobody has noticed the absurdity. And I find that deeply shocking.Puerto Rico was one of the top 10, and that initially passed muster. You’ve got a place in a rich country that has a long history of birth certificates, until you realize that this is one of the best places in the world for reaching 100, and the reason seems to be that the birth certificates are so badly documented that they restarted the entire system in 2010. They said, Birth certificates are no longer legal documents. They threw it all out and started again because of systemic levels of error.Demsas: Wow.Newman: And that’s how you reach 100.Demsas: Yeah.Newman: You just write your age down wrong. And you know, there is this sort of public-health element that is deeply troubling because you are one of the people in the world that doesn’t have a birth certificate, and you’re not alone.Demsas: Yeah.Newman: A quarter of children now don’t have a birth certificate—a quarter of all children. And we are just ignoring that.Demsas: I want to take a step back because I think that even though I think that this is deeply troubling, there is still a desire—I mean, part of the reason why there’s such a focus on this issue is people really want to figure out how to extend their life. Every year they get older, they’re, you know, deeply concerned with yoga, with protein intake, with lifting weights. A lot of different things begin to occupy your mind as the number turns to 3, 4, 5 at the beginning of your age.I want to ask about how much we know about the role of environmental versus genetic factors in determining longevity. Is all of this effort to try and tweak our life expectancy—is it really that worth it, or is it largely just a question of your genetics kind of determining what your life expectancy is going to be?Newman: I mean, there’s good news and bad news. And I’ll start with the bad news. The bad news is—well, it depends on your perspective, I suppose. The bad news is that the people who live the longest, on average, are born into rich countries with free health care. It’s that simple. The good news is: When it comes to the environment, it plays a big role, a very big role in how long you live. And there is a lot you can do about it, not a single one of which costs any money, right?So I’ll break it down. The simple things that we really know about lifespan: Don’t drink. There you’ll get, it depends, but if you [weren’t] going to get addicted, you’ll get about an extra 30 years of lifespan over what you would if you got addicted to alcohol. And for context, the CDC estimates that that’s about the same as heroin addiction. But if you drink without getting addicted and give up drinking, you’re still going to gain roughly three to four years.Demsas: Wow. Okay.Newman: Right. So that’s simple.Don’t smoke: You’ll gain about seven years. Do some exercise: You’ll get probably—it depends how much you exercise, but let’s say four years. And go to your GP, and that’s it. You don’t need to buy the cookbook.I think the reason the cookbook sells so well is that those three things are somewhat difficult, right? They’re kind of hard, and I think this is why longevity cures perennially do so well, is that they’re always easier than those three things. Almost always, you know, the ones that do well. And that is what underpins this market. But if you really want to live a longer time, just don’t drink; don’t smoke; do some exercise.Demsas: Well, tell me a little bit more about the genetic factors here. I mean, there was a study I saw that looked at 20,000 Nordic twins born in the late 1800s, and found that genetic differences had negligible impacts on survival before about age 60, but after age 60 and particularly those reaching their 80s and beyond, genetic factors become more important. I don’t know if you’ve seen that paper or if you’ve seen other research about this, but what do we know about the role of genetics in longevity?Newman: I haven’t seen that paper, but I’ve seen some extraordinarily bad papers on the roles of genetics and longevity. There’s just something called a genome-wide-association study, where you effectively say, you know, what genes are associated with extreme longevity. And I’ve seen that conducted on sample sizes of less than 200 people, which is, I mean—it’s a bit like saying you’ve got a space program when you let go of a carnival balloon. It’s a joke.So I would be extremely skeptical of longevity claims. You know, there is just this fundamental problem with our documents that if you go into that study and dive into that study, you’ll realize that they, like everybody else, have to trust what is written down on the piece of paper that says how old these people are.And there’s no way to check that. You know, I think we’re on the edge of a situation where you can. There have been some extraordinary scientific advances in estimating people’s age, but nobody seems to want to face up to that fundamental problem yet.Demsas: Well, Saul, this has been fantastic. Always our last and final question: What is something that you thought was a good idea but ended up being just good on paper?Newman: I’ll tell you something that turned out to be bad on paper in the moment. When I was an undergrad, it’s kind of like someone said to me, Go to the best U.K. university. It’s the one in Oxford, Oxford Brooks, which is not the University of Oxford. They told me completely the wrong university to go to, and I’d gone to it. And so to sort of crawl my way out of this hole, I found out that my university offered an exchange program to the Ivy League. And it was the first year they’d run it. So they just didn’t understand how much it was gonna cost.Demsas: Okay.Newman: And I was like, Great. I could be the poorest kid in the Ivy League, right? So I went on exchange, but without me knowing it, they realized how much it cost and pulled my visa status after the first six months. So I wound up in the FBI building in L.A., you know, in a locked elevator, going to one of the rooms for an interview, just completely not knowing that I’d overstayed.Demsas: Is that even a good on paper? That just sounds like you got screwed.Newman: Yeah. I mean, yeah, it’s as close as I got. I mean, it was good on paper right up until that point.Demsas: Yeah. What school were you going to?Newman: I was going to Ithaca—Cornell, in Ithaca—and paying, I think, $1,000 a semester in student loans.Demsas: Oh my gosh. That is, like, one of those things where you really gotta check to see if that deal’s going to pan out.Newman: Yeah, I think it worked out long term, but short term, yeah, not so great.Demsas: Well, this was great. Thank you so much for coming on the show.Newman: Thank you very much. It’s been a real pleasure.Demsas: If you like what you heard on today’s episode, I have a suggestion for you! My colleagues here at The Atlantic are exploring how we talk about aging, in our newest How To series. You can hear a trailer at the end of this episode, and then go subscribe to How to Age Up, coming April 7, wherever you listen to podcasts.[Music]Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw and fact-checked by Ena Alvarado. Rob Smierciak composed our theme music and engineered this episode. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

The age detectives are fighting.

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Do you want to live forever? How about to at least 105? You’ve probably heard of blue zones—amazing places where people live disproportionately longer and healthier lives. From Okinawa, Japan, to Ikaria, Greece these regions of the world have captured the imagination of an aging world.

Most of the advice that researchers have extracted from these places are what most people consider just common sense. Don’t stress too much or eat too much or drink too much alcohol. Make sure to eat plants and legumes, build community, and protect familial relationships.

But while this might be fine advice, at least one researcher is skeptical that the underlying research holds up.

On this week’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with Dr. Saul Newman, a researcher at the University of Oxford and University College London, who seeks to debunk the blue-zones research with studies of his own. His critics accuse him of writing a “deeply flawed” paper, keeping the debate active. (You can read their arguments here.)

Newman’s argument is pretty straightforward. The documentation certifying people’s births is really hard to verify, and there are many documented cases of age fraud. Some of that fraud is intentional—people claiming to be older than they are for cultural or financial benefit—and some is unintentional, thanks to shoddy recordkeeping or researchers getting fooled or making mistakes.

While this debate rests on methodological questions that we can’t fully explore in this episode, Newman’s provocation raises important questions about how much we should trust some of the most popular ideas in longevity research.

The following is a transcript of the episode:


Jerusalem Demsas: According to Our World in Data, in 1800, not a single region of the world had a life expectancy longer than 40 years. By 2021, the global average life expectancy was more than 70 years. It’s still not enough. We want to live longer, healthier lives. What can we do about it?

You’ve probably heard of “blue zones,” regions of the world where researchers claim to have found disproportionate numbers of people living into their hundreds. The first such Eden was Sardinia, Italy. Then Okinawa, Japan, and Loma Linda, California, among others.

But in recent years, despite the prevalence of cookbooks and diets and Netflix docuseries about these places explaining how to learn from the lifestyles of people living in these regions, something hasn’t quite added up.

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas, I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

Saul Newman is a longevity researcher at the University of Oxford and the University College London who has become convinced that this research doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. First, when he looks at the regions of the world designated blue zones, they just don’t look like particularly healthy places. The blue-zones theory claims that people live longer in these regions because of their naturally healthy lifestyles, but what Saul finds when he looks at these regions is low literacy, low incomes, high crime, and even short life expectancies relative to the national average. But even more tellingly, according to his research, introducing official birth certificates suspiciously coincides with a steep 69 to 82 percent fall in the number of people claiming to be over 109. A number of other statistical oddities indicate that the people claiming to be over 100 years old are either misleading us or are misled themselves.

Here at Good on Paper, several of the studies we discuss are preprints, which means they haven’t finished going through the formal review process that can take years. We do this because waiting to discuss studies until after they’ve been through that process would mean missing out on tracking important live debates. But I say all that now because, while Saul is convinced of his findings, this is not yet a settled debate. The proponents of blue zones are fighting back and claim he “omits or misunderstands” how rigorous their methods are.

But to hear his perspective on the science of longevity and why he doesn’t trust the blue-zones research, I’m excited to have Saul joining us today.

Saul, welcome to the show!

Saul Newman: Pleasure to be here.

Demsas: So why do people die?

Newman: Why do people die? Well, this is a fascinating question, and many of the people in aging research sort of still admit that we really don’t understand the fundamentals. So it’s actually a surprising thing that something so obvious is something we’re still figuring out. The best approximation we have at the moment is that we look at the inverse question: Why continue to live? What is the sort of evolutionary advantage of continuing to live?

There are two main thoughts. One I favor, and another that’s quite out of date. The out-of-date one is this sort of Darwinian idea that we exist just to make children. And this is the idea that has the problems, because if we exist just to make children, you get stuck with all sorts of awkward questions, like why does menopause evolve? Why evolve not to have children? Why evolve to help other people at the cost of your own reproduction? And we know all these things happen, and they happen across the animal kingdom, which brings us to the second idea.

And the second idea is that we evolve to pass on genes. And because we are related to so many different people, there are a lot of ways to pass on genes, including indirect ways where we help others. This is a sort of still-developing field in answering that question of why we exist, essentially. And it’s a very exciting one because it can explain things like the evolution of menopause, where we’re taking care of grandchildren.

But it can also potentially explain a lot of traits that are very difficult to analyze. Traits like homosexuality don’t make sense in this sort of cruel, hard Darwinian sense of, Oh, you’re just a baby factory. But there is a potential to explain them using inclusive fitness. I mean, that said, there was also the flip-side argument to that: Why do I need to justify myself in terms of evolutionary theory in order to exist? Well, of course you don’t. So it’s a very difficult debate to get through, but it’s also an open question at this point.

Demsas: What exactly is happening, though, when you die? Let’s say you don’t get an illness, right? Like, we know what happens when someone dies of a stroke or has a heart attack or has cancer or some other kind of long-running illness. But if you are just a generally healthy person—you’re in your 80s, or you’re in your 90s—what’s happening to your body?

Newman: It is slowly degenerating, in functional terms. So this is, you know, often very hard to measure, because you have to define what the function of your body is to say, you know, how it’s degenerating, but there are sort of obvious signs. So your metabolic function declines with age. Obvious things, like your physical capacity to run a hundred meters, for example, declines with age. Mental capacity does decline, but it can be much slower. And you know, I think that’s really fascinating, because if you look at, for example, the rankings of top chess players, they decline, but they decline extremely slowly. But essentially, there’s this sort of general systemic decline as you get older in terms of how well you can function.

Demsas: There’s a paper that I know that you wrote about this idea of, you know, as you get older, of course, your likelihood of death increases as you age. But there was a hypothesis that perhaps at a certain point, the rate at which you were likely to die kind of leveled off. So if you made it to 80, if you made it to 90—yes, your likelihood of dying every year was still, you know, elevated relative to a younger person, but it no longer was increasing significantly. What happened with that hypothesis?

Newman: Well, this touches on the best way we have to measure age and aging, and the sort of functional decline is increases in the mortality rate, because once you hit about age 40 or 35, your odds of dying double at a sort of fixed clockwork rate.

Demsas: Wait—what year was that?

Newman: Around 35 to 40. It depends a little bit because—

Demsas: Okay, great. Just logging that. (Laughs.)

Newman: Yeah. It starts to decline earlier, but it’s obscured by something called the “accident hump.” And this is basically, like, what you do when you’re a teenager, right? There’s a big bump in mortality caused by, you know, cars running into trees or jumping off of buildings into swimming pools or whatever it happens to be. But this clockwork doubling means that your mortality, your odds of dying, double usually around every eight years, and there’s really nothing we can do about that.

We can change the baseline, but every eight years, your odds of dying will double and double and double until you reach old age. And so in old age, there’s a hypothesis that mortality rates stop getting worse with age, and therefore that aging rates kind of stop or at least slow down considerably. Now, it doesn’t mean that things are getting better. You end up in this sort of Russian-roulette scenario where it’s a “see if your odds of dying flatten out.” And essentially, you’re playing Russian roulette every three months in terms of your mortality risk.

And what does that mean in terms of human lifespan? So it means something very interesting. It means that there’s no actual limit to how long you can play roulette without losing. You know, there’s a probabilistic sort of cap where eventually you are going to lose.

Demsas: Yeah, unless you’re the luckiest person alive.

Newman: Exactly. So there’s nothing per se ruling out a run of good numbers. But the problem here is that this idea is something that has been fought over for 50-odd years and has not been resolved, because it may be that your odds of dying do keep doubling and doubling and doubling until they hit the odds of dying that equal to one, right? So this is what I call the “maximum survivable age.” And it’s not clear to scientists which of those two was correct—whether we strike a maximum survivable age, where we can’t possibly live older than this age, or whether we reach a sort of grim Russian-roulette scenario.

Demsas: But life expectancy has improved remarkably over the 20th century. I mean, we’re seeing, you know, people with average lifespans of late ’70s in many developed nations, and rates of child mortality have declined significantly. So it seems like there’s a lot that policy, development, changes in public-health strategies can do to improve lifespan.

Is it your sense that—I mean, you just kind of brought up this idea of a maximum survivable age. Is it your perception that there is a number—there is a threshold at which, despite all of these things that you can do to make yourself healthier, to make yourself better, the genetic selection that might exist over generations, there’s just not a chance that humans are gonna live to be 300, 400, etcetera?

Newman: Well, in 2016, I waded into this debate because, like I said, there are two sides. And one of the sides had published an idea that there was this hard limit to maximum lifespan. And they published it in one of the most elite scientific journals there is. And I realized they had made colossal mistakes in their analysis—really just fundamental mistakes. They had rounded off most of their data to zero. They had accidentally deleted everyone who died in May and June, and just really made a complete mess of it. But they had argued for one case, and this case was that there’s a limit to how long you can live, a single limit.

I had another group come along and argue the opposite. Now, the opposite was this Russian-roulette scenario. The problem was that they had done something even worse, because they had taken everybody in Italy over the age of 105 and used them to build this sort of flattening-out curve. And when they had made this curve, they needed to say what it was flattening out from. So they needed to say, Well, what’s the normal midlife probability of death, and how fast does it get worse? What it boiled down to is that they had picked out the only estimate from earlier life-mortality models that gave them a flattening-out result.

So they had 861 options, and they chose the only option that gave them a significant result. So here I was, in the middle of a very vitriolic and long-running debate, saying that both camps were wrong. And I think both camps are wrong, because if you take that maximum survivable age and you estimate it, it doesn’t converge to a single value mathematically. And so in plain language, what that means is that if you grow up in a different environment, your maximum survivable age is different. And it moves over time, really clearly moves over time. So there is not one limit to human life. There is, at best, a smorgasbord of limits that depend on where you grew up, what population you’re in.

Demsas: So essentially, there is a maximum survivable age, but it will differ based on the environmental and policy choices that are being made at that time. And so I guess that then the question just becomes, like, how much can you really do on environmental factors?

So I want to get to this question about this theory of blue zones, which I think has become very popular. I mean, there’s been, you know, a popular book, a Netflix docuseries. It has inspired tons of attention.

There are regions of the world where people have claimed to live remarkably long lives—past 80, even past 100—at rates higher than you would expect just based on if it was just distributed normally: places like Okinawa, in Japan; Loma Linda, California; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Sardinia, Italy; Ikaria, Greece. What was originally the evidence for the idea that these places were unusually good for long life?

Newman: Well, the original evidence was rather amusing, actually, because like everything else in extreme-age research, there’s only one data source for human ages, and that’s documents. You know, you have government documents or informal documents that say, I’m this old. But the amusing factor was that the first blue-zone study found a bunch of people within Sardinia that seemed to be living a long time. They didn’t measure anyone outside of Sardinia. They decided that this was a global outlier for extraordinary ages, and they thought that incest, that people sleeping with each other was making this island—

Demsas: I’ve never heard this. (Laughs.)

Newman: It’s extraordinary. It doesn’t make it to the documentary—

Demsas: —to the Netflix docuseries. (Laughs.)

Newman: —for a very good reason. Yeah. I mean, there’s nobody making this lifestyle recommendation, I hope. (Laughs.)

Demsas: Dear God.

Newman: It’s kind of amazing. And that was the start of the blue zones.

So, you know, I sort of vaguely knew about this idea while I was getting involved in this fight between the plateau people and the people who think there’s a limit to human life. And, you know, I sort of thought of it as an amusing aside, but as time went on, it became less and less amusing, more and more concerning—like, starkly concerning. And the reason is that everything in these studies is based on looking at documents and saying, Oh, they’re consistent.

Demsas: You mean, like, birth certificates?

Newman: I mean birth certificates. So there are a lot of problems with that, that really came out of the woodwork over time because, you know, it’s on paper.

But when I started looking into these extreme-age cases, it really snowballed. Everything snowballed in a way that completely destroyed the idea and the underlying data of the blue zones. And effectively, you know, people are just believing their own fairy tales here. This really, you know, goes beyond cases, though, because early on in the investigation, I discovered that Japan, where it was claimed Japan had among the world’s best evidence for birth records. And in 2010, it turned out that 82 percent of the people over the age of 100 in the country were dead.

Demsas: And was it pension fraud, or what?

Newman: It was not pension fraud. It was the remarkable fact that in Japan, the household has to register your death, and if you are the last person in the household and you are dead, how do you do that?

Demsas: Oh, wow.

Newman: So they had, like, literally hundreds of thousands of people who had died in World War II or had died subsequently, and who were just getting older on paper, including the oldest man in Tokyo and the oldest woman in Tokyo.

Demsas: Were they paying them, like, Social Security?

Newman: Oh, yes.

Demsas: Like, what was happening? Where was the money going?

Newman: Well, in the case of the oldest man in Tokyo, the money was going to the family. And he was an extraordinary case that kicked off this investigation because—so there’s a sort of week in Japan where there’s a respect for the aged [day], and in preparation, city officials in Tokyo had gone looking for the oldest man. And eventually, they found out that the oldest man was in Tokyo, but he’d been dead in his apartment for 30 years, and his family were living in the apartment. And the oldest man in Tokyo had been steadily collecting his pension checks.

Now, what’s extraordinary about that is that his paperwork was perfectly in order. Like, if you handed their paperwork to a demographer, they would not be able to see anything wrong with it. I mean, it’s not like you die and automatically a form pops out in the central bureaucracy, right? There’s no actual way to know.

So it turned out that most extreme-old-age data was undetected errors, and this happened in every blue zone.

Demsas: So you went through all the blue zones and saw the same pattern?

Newman: I went through all the blue zones. The same thing happened. In Greece, at least 72 percent of the people in Greece who were over age 100 were collecting their pension checks from underground. And what’s remarkable about that is they had just passed a government audit, despite being dead. They passed a government audit in 2011, and in 2012, the government turned around and said, Actually, all those people were dead.

Demsas: So walk me through this a little bit, because I think there’s a few different arguments that you’re making here. One is that there are places where it’s quite difficult to know what’s happening with the population, because there’s [a situation] like what you mentioned in Japan, where the reporting of death is happening in a method where you actually can’t validate, when the oldest person in a household has died.

And then there’s a second strand of things, which is that people are actively committing fraud because of pensions and Social Security or other sorts of welfare benefits. And then there’s a third, which is just that these documents are not consistent or good, and so when demographers are trying to do this kind of research, they’re ending up having to rely on pretty shoddy documentation or to make broad claims.

So how much of this is happening in each place? Like, what do you think is most prevalent?

Newman: We don’t know what’s most prevalent. I mean, this is actually part of the problem: that we can see when an error has happened, but if we have documents in front of us that look good, we don’t know if they’re in error or not. And this pattern repeats itself. So there are many, many ways. There’s a whole layer cake of different methods by which you can screw up someone’s age.

Like you said, you can just write it down wrong at the start. There was a case where the world’s oldest man was actually just his younger brother, and they just swapped documents. It’s completely undetectable, and it’s happened three times. And there are other cases where there’s active pension fraud. I mean, there’s also cases where you just have someone who is illiterate and has picked up the wrong documents. The list goes on and on and on.

But the point is that demographers keep validating these people, and then decades—or even in one case, a century later—find out that they aren’t who they say they are. And that process is pretty much random. So you have to ask yourself, you know, what happens to a field over the course of more than a century when the data can only be checked for being consistent? You can’t actually tell if it’s true?

And I think it really set up this extraordinary disaster where not only are the blue zones based on data that doesn’t make sense; we actually have this sort of fundamental problem in looking at the oldest people within our society. Blue zones are an exemplary case of this, but it’s more general.

So to give you an example, health in the blue zones was poor before, during, and after they were established. Even in America, at least 17 percent of people over the age of 100 were clerical errors, missing, or dead—at least 17 percent. Many of them just did not have birth certificates. And we have no way of knowing. Like, it’s not as if I can take a person into a hospital, and they can put them into a machine, and it tells me how old they are.

Demsas: Cut their arm off and count the rings (Laughs.)

Newman: Exactly. The old pirate joke. You cut the leg off and count the rings. You can’t do that.

Demsas: Yeah.

Newman: And that means we are just taking all of this evidence at face value. Normally, that would be fine. Right? And this is where I’m going to apologize for talking numbers. But this is a theoretical result I came up with in 2018.

Let’s imagine you have 100,000 people who are 50, really 50. Like, they’ve got their documents, everything. And then you have an extraordinarily low rate of error in which you take 100 40-year-olds, and you give them documents to say they’re 50. If you do that, normally you’d expect, Oh, I can just ignore this. My statistical model will take care of it as noise. But something happens instead that is extraordinary, because those 40-year-olds are, like I said, less than half as likely to die than the real data. So your errors have a lower rate of dying and being removed from the population than your real data—

Demsas: Wait—sorry. Can you explain that? I don’t understand.

Newman: So you remember: I told you about the clock where your mortality rate doubles every eight years? That means if, let’s say—and I call them “young liars.” If my young liars are eight years younger, their odds of dying day to day are half. So the errors have half the mortality rate of the real data. Every eight years, the percentage of errors doubles, and by the time you get to 100, every single person or almost every single person is an error.

So you can’t ignore these tiny error rates. It doesn’t matter what country you’re in. It doesn’t matter where you are. You can’t just pretend they don’t exist, because they build up in this weird, nonlinear way over time, and it means that you would actually mathematically expect all of the oldest people in the world to be fake. So, you know, I’ve published this in a scientific journal. No one’s ever been able to argue the math, but they do not want to face up to sort of the repercussions of this.

Demsas: Yeah. Part of this is very familiar to me. I don’t have a birth certificate. I was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and the only document I have about my birth and parentage is a baptismal certificate, where I’m pretty sure it was filled out by a member of the church that I was baptized into. I’m not joking: It’s written in teal ink.

We were asylum seekers here. I’m, like, taking this to the State Department. I’m like, I swear to God, my father is my father. You literally have to give me a passport. I’m a citizen here. And it was such—it was awful. It was such a hassle. And then—now I’m getting off topic here, but—my brother had to get a DNA test to prove that our parents were his parents in order to get his driver’s license eventually, and his passport. So I’m very familiar with this.

And there’s another phenomenon—which, I mean, I don’t know if this is something that you’ve seen in your research—wherein some cultures and communities, of course, being older is, like, quite an advantage. And so there will be people who you’re like, I know how old you are, but you are telling everyone you are 10 to 15 years older than you are. Have you seen this in your research?

Newman: All the time. Yeah, I mean, constantly. There was a study in the BBC a couple of months ago where they looked at heart age. And this is a National Institute on Aging–funded study on people in the rainforest, right? And they say, We don’t have any idea how old we are. And the headline is, Oh, these people have really young hearts for their age. You know, they don’t know their age. They’re literally telling you, We are making it up.

And, you know, if you have any doubts about the blue zones, there used to be something called the “longevity zones” that predates the blue zones. It was put out by National Geographic in exactly the same way. It had exactly the same hallmarks of, Oh, you live in a mountainous region that’s very remote, and you eat yogurt and vegetarian diets.

And it was exactly what you’re saying. These people gave status to village elders, so people were inflating their ages to an extraordinary degree. They were saying, I’m 122. And that’s all it was. You know, this was three regions across the world: Soviet Georgia, where apparently yogurt was the secret; the Vilcabamba Valley, in Ecuador; and the Hunza Valley, in Pakistan. These were the blue zones, and every single case was based on rubbish recordkeeping. And, you know, it just seems to be that’s exactly what’s happened again.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: Even if blue zones aren’t real, does that really change how we think about living longer?

[Break]

Demsas: The thing I’m wrestling with when I engage with this, because, you know, you have published this work; you’ve written about it in the Times and other places. But the fundamental idea that there are locations that are better for people’s lifespans seems not overturned by this, right?

Like, we know that location matters a lot for health outcomes, air pollution in particular. It feels like there’s a new paper every other week showing that there’s massive impacts of air pollution on life expectancy, on cognitive functioning, on general health. Is the fundamental concept that there are certain places where people are going to live longer still one that we should be putting more research into?

Newman: I think that’s not controversial. But I also think it’s very well understood, for exactly the reasons you say. There’s a study every week on average life expectancy. And what’s striking about this is that those places are very different from the places that get extreme life expectancy.

So I basically took a sample of 80 percent of the world’s 110-year-olds and most of the world’s 105-year-olds, and looked at their distribution within countries. So I’m sitting in London right now. And in all of England, the place with the best rate of reaching 105 was the single poorest inner-city suburb with the single fewest number of 90-year-olds.

So those two things—where it’s good to live, on average, and where it’s good to reach extreme old age—were exactly the opposite. This is like saying Flint, Michigan, is the healthiest place in the U.S.A. No shade on Flint, Michigan. The government is really the cause of this, but it does not make any sense. It fundamentally doesn’t make any sense. And it gets even worse when you start looking at the details.

So the single U.S. blue zone is Loma Linda. I mean, the CDC measured Loma Linda for lifespan. They measure it, and it is completely and utterly unremarkable.

Demsas: I’m not, you know, deeply reporting in the longevity space here, but the way that you have talked about your interactions with some of these authors makes me think it’s an especially contentious field. Why has it kind of remained so difficult to sort of overturn this popular narrative around blue zones?

Newman: Well, it makes a lot of money.

Demsas: Yeah.

Newman: It’s really that simple. I mean, there are multiple best-selling cookbooks, you know. And I’d like to point out, of course: Don’t take your health advice from cookbooks. Its really sort of needs reinforcing every now and again. (Laughs.) But, you know, if you really had a cure for aging, you’d be winning the Nobel Prize.

Demsas: You wouldn’t be writing a cookbook? (Laughs.)

Newman: You would not be writing a cookbook. You wouldn’t be on late-night television, you know, making a sales pitch. You’d just be like, I want my Nobel Prize. I have a cure for all diseases. Where’s my money? It’s really fundamental.

But there is another aspect to this in that a lot of research careers are built on examining the oldest old, and even more research careers are built on just assuming that birth-certificate ages are correct. And to show that they’re not correct in an undetectable fashion on such a massive scale threatens a lot of people’s research careers.

Demsas: But part of the thing that I find interesting about the blue zone’s recommendations is that a lot of them are things that are just straightforwardly good advice, right? Move naturally. Have a sense of purpose. Stress less. Don’t eat too much. Eat beans and legumes. Have community. Put your family first. The only one that I think is potentially not actually good is: Drink alcohol in moderation. But the rest of them are generally associated with good health to different extents and, you know, with longevity to different extents.

I guess, like, what drove you to become so interested in pushing back on this narrative, given that the advice that people are getting is generally still, like, you know, good health advice? Like, you probably should do most of these things if you’re not already.

Newman: Well, I think the problem is the way in which the people in these regions are really kind of culturally being exploited. Because they don’t bear any connection to what actually happens in the blue zones. And I think that was what really drove it home for me, is that you have this sort of flavor of some guy who turns up for a few weeks, looks around, decides it’s the ikigai, and goes home. And if you actually go to the government of Japan, they’ve been measuring Okinawa, for example, since 1975. And every single time they’ve measured Okinawa, it has had terrible health. It has been right at the bottom of the pile.

Demsas: Wow.

Newman: I’ll take you through some statistics that were robustly ignored by people in selling these blue-zones ideas. Body mass index is measured in Okinawa and compared to the rest of Japan, and it’s measured in over-75-year-olds. So if you go back to 1975, that’s people born 1900 or before, and they measure how heavy they are. They have been last every year, by a massive margin.

And then you look at the next claim. So that sort of knocks a hole in the “move naturally” claim. The “move naturally” claim also has this sort of idea that people grow gardens in the blue zones, right? The government of Japan measures that, and they are third to last out of 47 prefectures, after Tokyo and Osaka, where everyone lives in a high-rise. They don’t grow gardens. And we’ve known that since the beginning of records.

And then you look at the idea that they eat plants. It seems really noncontroversial. But people in Okinawa do not eat their veggies. And we know this because we ask them. They’re last in the consumption of root vegetables, last in the consumption of leafy vegetables, last in the consumption of pickled vegetables. They’re third from the top in other raw meat. You know, they eat 40 kilograms of meat a year, at least, which is way above the global and national average. And even sweet potato—sweet potato is on the front of the Netflix documentary, these purple sweet potatoes—they are last for sweet potato consumption out of all the 47 prefectures of Japan.

Demsas: Wow. Okay.

Newman: And they always have been. There’s another idea that, you know, they have a sense of belonging, that they belong to a faith-based community. They’re 93.4 percent atheist. They’re third to last in the country, and it is a very atheist country. So the problem is that none of these claims have any connection to reality whatsoever.

Demsas: Yeah.

Newman: And it’s been sitting in the open for decades.

Demsas: Have you become a lot more cynical about scientific research as a result of this?

Newman: Oh, I mean, absolutely. It’s extraordinary, the sort of cognitive dissonance that goes on. And really, I mean, all of these claims just have no connection to reality. And you see this sort of sad thing playing out with the locals, where a beach resort will get built. People will fly in for three days, and they’re still sitting there going, like, Why don’t we have a hospital? Why are we all still poor?

You know, just basic social problems get overlooked because of this. So yeah, it has made me much more cynical, because these, I guess you would call them “lumps and bumps,” should have been obvious right from the point when someone said incest was good for living a long time.

Demsas: So, like, I mean, preregistration helps reduce a lot of issues in social science. There’s also been increasing attempts to subject, you know, big findings, important findings to replication by various groups and individuals.

I mean, is there something fundamental that you think needs to happen differently in terms of how reputable journals accept new findings? Do you think that all the data needs to be open? What needs to happen here to prevent these sorts of problems in the future?

Newman: In short, the answer is: really a lot.

Demsas: Yeah.

Newman: The slightly less short answer is that the core of science is reproducibility. It is the core idea. And these results are not reproducible. And it’s not just that they’re not reproducible. After 20 years, nobody has published the underlying data. And there needs to be a much heavier emphasis on replication in science and on testing claims—especially profitable claims—before they’re just thrown out into the open.

Because, you know, I find it amazing. This is something that was discussed at an elite level at the World Economic Forum. Now, we cannot have a cookbook-based piece of lifestyle advice governing global health. So we need to really rejig the—I mean, first, the level of skepticism in science needs to go up considerably. And second, we need to really start hitting back on papers that need to be retracted, papers that need to be removed from the scientific record because they do not replicate or because, you know, like the first two—the studies I pointed out here—because they’re based on extremely questionable choices.

Demsas: So most people listening to this will have heard of this topic before, but have you found anything that indicates it’s been especially influential in public health in that policy makers are taking it quite seriously as a way of trying to push different nonvalidated recommendations?

Newman: Yes. I mean, the presentation at the World Economic Forum is really a low point, an extraordinary low point. But I think what is, like I said, more troubling is that you have an entire machinery of public health here that didn’t spot how completely wrong this is. In retrospect, it’s so wrong that everybody’s sort of giggling. But it’s been 20 years of this being perhaps the most popular idea in demography.

And so I get worried about this because I’ve just completed a new study. And in this new study, I have taken every single 100-year-old in the world and analyzed where they’re from and what countries attain the age of 100 at the highest rates. And to do this, I took United Nations data contributed by every government on Earth, in good faith, with the best efforts at data cleaning—both by the governments and by the UN. And the places that reach 100 at the most remarkable rates don’t make any sense.

Malawi, which is one of the 10 poorest countries on Earth, is in the top 10, and it’s in the top 10 routinely. You know, Western Sahara, which is a region that does not have a government, is one of the best places in the world for reaching 100, according to the UN. I mean, that’s fundamentally absurd. And it’s fundamentally absurd that it has been 70 years that this data has been produced for, and nobody has noticed the absurdity. And I find that deeply shocking.

Puerto Rico was one of the top 10, and that initially passed muster. You’ve got a place in a rich country that has a long history of birth certificates, until you realize that this is one of the best places in the world for reaching 100, and the reason seems to be that the birth certificates are so badly documented that they restarted the entire system in 2010. They said, Birth certificates are no longer legal documents. They threw it all out and started again because of systemic levels of error.

Demsas: Wow.

Newman: And that’s how you reach 100.

Demsas: Yeah.

Newman: You just write your age down wrong. And you know, there is this sort of public-health element that is deeply troubling because you are one of the people in the world that doesn’t have a birth certificate, and you’re not alone.

Demsas: Yeah.

Newman: A quarter of children now don’t have a birth certificate—a quarter of all children. And we are just ignoring that.

Demsas: I want to take a step back because I think that even though I think that this is deeply troubling, there is still a desire—I mean, part of the reason why there’s such a focus on this issue is people really want to figure out how to extend their life. Every year they get older, they’re, you know, deeply concerned with yoga, with protein intake, with lifting weights. A lot of different things begin to occupy your mind as the number turns to 3, 4, 5 at the beginning of your age.

I want to ask about how much we know about the role of environmental versus genetic factors in determining longevity. Is all of this effort to try and tweak our life expectancy—is it really that worth it, or is it largely just a question of your genetics kind of determining what your life expectancy is going to be?

Newman: I mean, there’s good news and bad news. And I’ll start with the bad news. The bad news is—well, it depends on your perspective, I suppose. The bad news is that the people who live the longest, on average, are born into rich countries with free health care. It’s that simple. The good news is: When it comes to the environment, it plays a big role, a very big role in how long you live. And there is a lot you can do about it, not a single one of which costs any money, right?

So I’ll break it down. The simple things that we really know about lifespan: Don’t drink. There you’ll get, it depends, but if you [weren’t] going to get addicted, you’ll get about an extra 30 years of lifespan over what you would if you got addicted to alcohol. And for context, the CDC estimates that that’s about the same as heroin addiction. But if you drink without getting addicted and give up drinking, you’re still going to gain roughly three to four years.

Demsas: Wow. Okay.

Newman: Right. So that’s simple.

Don’t smoke: You’ll gain about seven years. Do some exercise: You’ll get probably—it depends how much you exercise, but let’s say four years. And go to your GP, and that’s it. You don’t need to buy the cookbook.

I think the reason the cookbook sells so well is that those three things are somewhat difficult, right? They’re kind of hard, and I think this is why longevity cures perennially do so well, is that they’re always easier than those three things. Almost always, you know, the ones that do well. And that is what underpins this market. But if you really want to live a longer time, just don’t drink; don’t smoke; do some exercise.

Demsas: Well, tell me a little bit more about the genetic factors here. I mean, there was a study I saw that looked at 20,000 Nordic twins born in the late 1800s, and found that genetic differences had negligible impacts on survival before about age 60, but after age 60 and particularly those reaching their 80s and beyond, genetic factors become more important. I don’t know if you’ve seen that paper or if you’ve seen other research about this, but what do we know about the role of genetics in longevity?

Newman: I haven’t seen that paper, but I’ve seen some extraordinarily bad papers on the roles of genetics and longevity. There’s just something called a genome-wide-association study, where you effectively say, you know, what genes are associated with extreme longevity. And I’ve seen that conducted on sample sizes of less than 200 people, which is, I mean—it’s a bit like saying you’ve got a space program when you let go of a carnival balloon. It’s a joke.

So I would be extremely skeptical of longevity claims. You know, there is just this fundamental problem with our documents that if you go into that study and dive into that study, you’ll realize that they, like everybody else, have to trust what is written down on the piece of paper that says how old these people are.

And there’s no way to check that. You know, I think we’re on the edge of a situation where you can. There have been some extraordinary scientific advances in estimating people’s age, but nobody seems to want to face up to that fundamental problem yet.

Demsas: Well, Saul, this has been fantastic. Always our last and final question: What is something that you thought was a good idea but ended up being just good on paper?

Newman: I’ll tell you something that turned out to be bad on paper in the moment. When I was an undergrad, it’s kind of like someone said to me, Go to the best U.K. university. It’s the one in Oxford, Oxford Brooks, which is not the University of Oxford. They told me completely the wrong university to go to, and I’d gone to it. And so to sort of crawl my way out of this hole, I found out that my university offered an exchange program to the Ivy League. And it was the first year they’d run it. So they just didn’t understand how much it was gonna cost.

Demsas: Okay.

Newman: And I was like, Great. I could be the poorest kid in the Ivy League, right? So I went on exchange, but without me knowing it, they realized how much it cost and pulled my visa status after the first six months. So I wound up in the FBI building in L.A., you know, in a locked elevator, going to one of the rooms for an interview, just completely not knowing that I’d overstayed.

Demsas: Is that even a good on paper? That just sounds like you got screwed.

Newman: Yeah. I mean, yeah, it’s as close as I got. I mean, it was good on paper right up until that point.

Demsas: Yeah. What school were you going to?

Newman: I was going to Ithaca—Cornell, in Ithaca—and paying, I think, $1,000 a semester in student loans.

Demsas: Oh my gosh. That is, like, one of those things where you really gotta check to see if that deal’s going to pan out.

Newman: Yeah, I think it worked out long term, but short term, yeah, not so great.

Demsas: Well, this was great. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Newman: Thank you very much. It’s been a real pleasure.

Demsas: If you like what you heard on today’s episode, I have a suggestion for you! My colleagues here at The Atlantic are exploring how we talk about aging, in our newest How To series. You can hear a trailer at the end of this episode, and then go subscribe to How to Age Up, coming April 7, wherever you listen to podcasts.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw and fact-checked by Ena Alvarado. Rob Smierciak composed our theme music and engineered this episode. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

Read the full story here.
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Inside the Investigation, Seizure and Death of Peanut the Social Media Star Squirrel

New details are emerging about the seizure of Peanut the squirrel in upstate New York in October

New York environmental workers who came with a warrant looking for Peanut the squirrel found the scampering social media star on a bathtub. His housemate, Fred the raccoon, was in a suitcase in a bedroom closet.Soon after the Oct. 30 seizure, both animals were euthanized and Peanut became a martyr – held up as a symbol of government overreach by political candidates, including Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance, who invoked Peanut's name during a rally just days before the presidential election. State and Local officials were inundated with angry messages and even bomb threats.How did events in a sleepy corner of upstate New York snowball so dramatically? Records recently released under freedom of information requests show complaints about the P’nuts Freedom Farm Animal Sanctuary were initially treated with little urgency by the state Department of Environmental Conservation — but that changed in the weeks leading up to the fateful seizure amid new complaints and the reported arrival of raccoons to the sanctuary.Government officials laid the groundwork for euthanizing the animals so they could be tested for rabies in the days before the seizure. Yet a state employee also lined up a wildlife rehabilitator to take Peanut, if needed.A final phone call to discuss Peanut’s fate was made after the squirrel bit the gloved thumb of a wildlife biologist, according to records. Peanut, also known as P'nut, was the star of the sanctuary run by Mark Longo and Daniela Bittner in Southport near the Pennsylvania line. Online videos show the squirrel skittering on Longo’s shoulders, holding and eating waffles and wearing a tiny cowboy hat.Longo said he found Peanut years ago in New York City after the animal's mother was hit by a car. It’s against New York state law to possess a wild animal without a license, though Longo and Bittner took steps last year to become wildlife rehabilitators. Fred the raccoon was dropped off at the sanctuary last summer. The spirited interactions between the animals and their human companions racked up views — but documents show they also drew the attention of critics and state wildlife authorities.The DEC knew about the sanctuary since at least January 2024. “A report came in of a recent news story about this facility,” reads an incident report. “There are images of a non-releasable squirrel being referred to as a ‘pet’ and being dressed up and showcased for publicity reasons."One self-described wildlife rehabilitator and former neighbor emailed authorities multiple times with complaints about how the animals were being treated. In May, a conservation officer spoke to Longo and was told that Peanut and another baby squirrel were sent to Connecticut. Longo said in a recent interview that was true, but that Peanut later came back. When a fresh complaint came in that month, one officer wrote, “no judge will give us a search warrant for a squirrel.” “Unfortunately this isn’t a big crime, it is just a violation,” a conservation officer wrote in response to a complaint that summer. “Mark won’t let me into his house without a search warrant. There is just nothing more I can do at this point. I am sorry.” Views shifted by October amid more complaints and the arrival of Fred the raccoon — a species that can carry and transmit rabies. One correspondent alleged Longo was “keeping a raccoon in a small cage in his house. I follow him on TikTok."DEC workers viewed videos on Facebook, TikTok and Instagram and reached out to the Chemung County health department. State environmental officials asked a county health official if they recommend testing animals for rabies “as a precaution for human safety.” That would require the animals to be killed so brain tissue could be examined.The county, in turn, checked with a state health department expert, who advised the animals would need to be tested if there was any potential of rabies exposure. A week before the search, the county emailed the DEC: “We fully expect that all ‘wild’ animals in the home will need to be euthanized and sent for rabies testing due to the nature of the human contact.”A judge signed a search warrant authorizing the seizure of illegally possessed wildlife. Peanut bites the hand that seizes it A team of about a dozen searchers converged on Longo's property around 10:30 a.m. on the morning of Oct. 30. Longo said the squirrel was taken to Connecticut, according to the incident report — though he later conceded to The Associated Press that was a lie in a highly stressful moment.Bittner revealed to searchers the raccoon was in an upstairs closet. Fred was in an open suitcase on the floor, which was zipped closed and moved to give workers room to transfer the raccoon into a carrier.Peanut's seizure was more dramatic. The squirrel bit the state wildlife biologist through a thick leather glove with a nitrile exam glove underneath. The worker had a bleeding wound, according to a DEC email.A “visibly upset” Longo pleaded with searchers not to take Peanut and said the squirrel was a large source of income for the farm, according to incident reports."He stated he knew we would be euthanizing it,” the report reads. Anger over Peanut's fate revolves around the belief by critics that he was needlessly killed.Longo believes euthanization was always on the government's agenda, citing the pre-search email indicating that testing on the animals was expected. Longo and Bittner said they did not witness anyone getting medical attention during the seizure.A DEC report indicates the agency took steps before the raid to place the squirrel with a wildlife rehabilitator, if needed “for temporay holding/rehabbing.” The agency also coordinated with local animal control in case animals needed to be euthanized.The documents suggest Peanut's fate was ultimately sealed at the end of the search, when a call was made to a county health department official about the “high profile” case. A state DEC worker recalled in a report that the person on the phone said “both animals should be tested as a precaution as she didn't want to chance it.” That's because both animals were in direct contact with people in the home and the squirrel bit someone. County officials have said they had to follow rabies protocols from the state. “Sad but it has to be done,” a county health official wrote in an email that afternoon. “The poor animals didn’t do anything wrong.”The rabies tests were performed quickly, though officials didn’t publicly disclose the negative results until almost two weeks later.By then, Peanut’s death had made headlines around the world.Bomb threats were made to the DEC buildings. Government inboxes filled up with emails containing invective like “BURN IN HELL,” “SHAME ON YOU!!!” A caller to the state left a message beginning, “I want to know exactly why you freaks killed Peanut the squirrel. You people are insane.”The DEC conducted an internal investigation after the seizure, eventually promising to add a new deputy commissioner for public protection and to develop a body-camera policy for its officers.“We have carefully reviewed all the public feedback and we understand the distress caused to communities throughout the state,” acting Commissioner Amanda Lefton said in a prepared release last month. “We know that we can do better moving forward.” Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Feb. 2025

Seven Books About How the Earth Is Changing Right Now

These visceral reported accounts will help readers better understand the new ecological status quo.

On a shelf next to my desk, I keep the books that shaped how I think about our planet—and how I cover it as a journalist focused on nature and the climate. When I sit down to write about the natural world, titles such as The End of Nature, by Bill McKibben; A Sand County Almanac, by Aldo Leopold; and The Solace of Open Spaces, by Gretel Ehrlich, accompany me. In the decades since they were published, I’ve returned to these touchstones again and again. Each one felt pivotal to my comprehension of the way humans affect our environment.But lately, as I read news about deadly heat waves and disappearing glaciers, those titles are beginning to seem almost naive. They’re full of far-off warnings of what could come if we don’t curb emissions or cut back our rampaging use of resources. There is no if anymore. Our planet is record-breakingly hot because of a global failure to heed those admonitions. Fifty-five years after the first Earth Day was organized, long-term data about warming oceans and aridifying forests are paired, more and more, with impossible-to-ignore proof of civilization’s cascading effects: raging storms, endangered species, fire seasons that stretch all year long. We’re past prediction and into perception. Today, a new genre of writing—one that records the ongoing crisis—feels more useful than my old standbys. Below are seven visceral reported accounts of what’s happening in the places where the Earth is changing most rapidly; each will help readers better understand the new status quo.Silent Spring, by Rachel CarsonThis 63-year-old classic might seem to belong on the shelf with the other old-school books, but it’s worth returning to because Carson built the mold for reporting on an ongoing disaster. She made chemical pesticides, an otherwise dry subject, terrifying and compelling by outlining the ways that DDT, a highly toxic insecticide, was harming the natural world. By referencing the texture of paper-thin eggshells and the eerie silence of bird-free spring mornings, she pulled on all our senses in order to precisely pin down the damage. Then she untangled the chemistry of these dangerous compounds, connected their varied effects, and called out chemical companies and the U.S. military for their complicity in spreading them, giving readers context for what they saw happening in daily life. Carson’s report was revelatory in its time: It was used in congressional testimony that led to a ban on DDT, and it was cited during the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Today, it’s still remarkable for its clarity and punch, and reads like a blueprint for making sense of a rapidly changing ecosystem.Fire Weather, by John VaillantVaillant’s book covers a natural disaster that, he acknowledges, lacks subtlety: The 2016 Fort McMurray Fire, the most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history, scorched a community that was purpose-built to extract bitumen-rich oil sands. Fire Weather is a horror story in three dimensions. As Vaillant describes, instant by instant, the fire’s rampage—whole neighborhoods cut off by flames; houses vaporized in six minutes flat, everything burned but the cast-iron bathtubs—he also connects the resource extraction happening in places like Fort McMurray to the effects of climate change that are setting the stage for megafires, such as warming and aridification. As Vaillant explains, human choices continue to fuel burns on a macro level as well as on a micro level; part of the reason the Fort McMurray Fire was so destructive was that officials couldn’t believe it was going to be as bad as the forecasts suggested. They held off on evacuating for far too long. Vaillant identifies the problem: People struggle to imagine disasters out of scale with what they have seen in the past. To prepare for what’s coming, he warns, we’re all going to have to change our mindset.[Read: Climate models can’t explain what’s happening to Earth]Five Days at Memorial, by Sheri FinkWhen Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, in 2005, the city was first slammed by brutal winds, then inundated by floodwaters as its levees failed. In the chaos, residents were forced to choose between terrible options. At Memorial Medical Center, in the city’s Uptown neighborhood, doctors and nurses had to decide how to care for and evacuate very sick patients in a facility that was swiftly deteriorating: Generators were swamped by the storm surge; oxygen ran low; the heat made everything worse; the emergency-management plans that the hospital administration had recently double-checked quickly failed. Fink’s meticulous research—she interviewed more than 500 people—shows, in painstaking detail, how the hospital’s disaster protocol crumbled as the water rose, and then how communication buckled under a creeping sense of panic. In that maelstrom, several patients were given doses of sedatives that ultimately killed them, and Fink’s account revolves around those decisions and the criminal allegations that arose after the crisis. Its real subject, however, is how people respond when they’re faced with life-and-death choices in desperate situations—something even more relevant two decades later.Crossings, by Ben GoldfarbHumans alter the environment in innumerable ways. One of the most significant modifications, Goldfarb argues, is also one of the most ubiquitous: roads. The second an ecosystem is carved up for cars, it’s changed drastically. In a grim, yet zippy, drive down some of the planet’s most ecologically harmful roadways, Goldfarb shows how highways and thoroughfares have splintered habitats, wiped out generations of migrating creatures, and fractured species’ expected spectrum of sound and light. He focuses on animals—both charismatic megafauna, such as the violent, inbred mountain lions who are trapped between Los Angeles freeways, and bugs, which make up a crucial part of the food web and have been slaughtered en masse by high-speed cars. But he also has an ear for human details, profiling, for instance, a mule-deer biologist who is deeply allergic to mule deer. This lively, wide-ranging book about roadkill also has a solemn message: If cities and countries continue to depend on car travel, constructing roads that sever terrain, they’ll end up building a lonelier, less humane society for all of us.Read: The era of climate change has created a new emotionPaying the Land, by Joe SaccoWhereas Fire Weather demonstrates the kind of fast, all-consuming destruction that fossil-fuel extraction can lead to, Paying the Land demonstrates the quiet social fracturing that can result over the long term. Sacco visits the communities of the Dene, one of the First Nations of Canada’s Northwest Territories. In a series of illustrated profiles, his subjects discuss the long history of fuel mining and environmental degradation in the area—starting with the moment the British monarchy handed the territories over to the fur-trapping industry in the 17th century and continuing to modern-day fracking. But the interviewees’ stories aren’t complete without telling a parallel story; they speak of forced removal, culture-eradicating residential schools, and shattered traditional hunting and fishing practices, which have wounded multiple generations. Sacco also investigates how being economically dependent on gas companies and the government has created complicated rifts: Families fell apart over whether to support fracking, while alcohol and drug abuse became rampant. It’s an ongoing story of cultural and landscape loss all too common in the communities closest to the petroleum industry.The Great Derangement, by Amitav GhoshBroadly, Ghosh argues, the problems of climate change are created in the developed world yet are felt most acutely outside it. Ghosh, who has seen the ravaging effects of tornadoes and monsoons on his native Kolkata, builds his series of interlinked essays about the history and politics of global warming around a double-edged storytelling problem that he says prevents the people in rich countries from grasping the enormity of climate change. First, because our common narrative framework depends on the past, many people still consider warming through a speculative lens, failing to recognize the severity, and urgency, of superstorms and sea-level rise. And second, that framework also neglects to assess the past, because it leaves out how centuries of extraction and domination by wealthy, powerful countries have made it hard for formerly colonized nations to be resilient in the face of rising temperatures. That’s the “derangement” of his title: the inability of our stories to change as quickly as our world is.Read: The climate action that the world needsCategory Five, by Porter FoxThe ocean, Earth’s biggest absorber of carbon and heat, is the largest single player in the climate crisis. As the seas warm and rise, they are now altering the paths that storms follow, the direction of once-reliable trade winds, and the intensity of weather; as a result, hurricane season is expanding, and new research shows that more homes are at risk of flooding than ever before. This book chronicles Fox’s quest to understand modern superstorms, which he pursues mostly on the water: As the son of a boat builder who grew up on the coast of Maine, Fox knows that no one understands the variability of the ocean more concretely than sailors. On a series of sailing trips, he learns that much of what is known about oceanography comes from small-scale, underfunded institutions and rogue observers. For instance, the federal research budget for oceans, the coasts, and the Great Lakes in 2024 was just $251.5 million, a fraction of what the government spends on things such as space exploration—and that number was determined before DOGE mandated major cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Humanity knows that bigger, more catastrophic storms are coming, but as Fox persuasively shows, the United States’ underinvestment undermines the entire world’s ability to predict them.

Israel Police Scour Coast For Possible Shark Attack Victim

The unidentified man went swimming in an area that has long seen close encounters between marine predators and beachgoers.

HADERA, Israel (AP) — Israeli police on Tuesday were scouring the coast for a swimmer they fear may have been attacked by a shark in an area that has long seen close encounters between marine predators and beachgoers who sometimes seek them out.A shiver of endangered dusky and sandbar sharks has been swimming close to the area for years, attracting onlookers who approach the sharks, drawing pleas from conservation groups for authorities to separate people from the wild animals. Nature groups say those warnings went unheeded. On Monday, police launched a search along the Mediterranean coast after reports that a shark attacked a swimmer on a beach near the city of Hadera.On Tuesday, the beach was closed off as search teams used boats and underwater equipment to look for the man. His identity was not immediately known, but Israeli media said he had gone to swim with the sharks. Israelis flocked in large numbers to the beach during a weeklong holiday, sharing the waters with a dozen or more sharks. Some tugged on the sharks’ fins, while others threw them fish to eat. Dusky sharks can stretch 4 meters (13 feet) long and weigh about 350 kilograms (750 pounds). Sandbar sharks are smaller, growing to about 2.5 meters (8 feet) and 100 kilograms (220 pounds).Yigael Ben-Ari, head of marine rangers at the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, said it was not known how the man behaved around the sharks. But he said the public should know not to enter the water when sharks are present and not to touch or play with them.One video shared by Israeli media showed a shark swimming right up to bathers in thigh-deep water.“What a huge shark!” the man filming exclaims, as the shark approaches him. “Whoa! He’s coming toward us!”“Don’t move!” he implores a boy standing nearby, who replies: “I’m leaving.”The man then asks: “What, are you afraid of the sharks?”The behavior, some of which was witnessed by an Associated Press photographer two days before the attack, flew in the face of the advice of the parks authority.“Like every wild animal, the sharks’ behavior may be unpredictable,” the authority said in a statement.This would be just the third recorded shark attack in Israel, according to Ben-Ari. One person was killed in an attack in the 1940s.The area, where warm water released by a nearby power plant flows into the sea, has for years attracted dozens of sharks between October and May. Ben-Ari said swimming is prohibited in the area, but swimmers enter the water anyway.“It would have been appropriate to take steps to preserve and regulate public safety, but over the years, chaos has developed in the area,” the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, an environmental group, said in a statement.It said fishermen, boats, divers, surfers and snorkelers intersected dangerously with a wild animal that “is not accustomed to being around crowds of people.”SPNI said further steps were needed to prevent similar incidents, like designating a safe zone from where people could view the sharks without swimming close to them.Israeli authorities on Monday closed the beach and others nearby.Goldenberg reported from Jerusalem.

Sharks Drew Crowds Who Chased and Fed Them off Israel's Coast — Until One Man Disappeared

Israeli police are looking for a swimmer who they fear was attacked by a shark

HADERA, Israel (AP) — Israeli police on Tuesday were scouring the waters off the country's Mediterranean coast for a swimmer who they fear may have been attacked by a shark, in an area that for decades has seen close encounters between marine predators and beachgoers who sometimes seek them out.A shiver of endangered dusky and sandbar sharks has been swimming close to the area for years, attracting onlookers who approach the sharks and drawing pleas from conservation groups for authorities to separate people from the wild animals. Nature groups say those warnings went unheeded and on Monday, police were forced to launch a search after receiving reports that a swimmer was attacked by a shark on a beach near the Israeli city of Hadera.On Tuesday, the beach near Hadera was closed off as search teams scoured the sea by boat and underwater equipment for the swimmer. The man’s identity was not immediately known, but Israeli media said he had gone to swim with the sharks. Israelis flocked in large numbers to the beach during a weeklong holiday, sharing the waters with a dozen or more sharks. Some tugged on the sharks’ fins, while others threw them fish to eat.Ben-Ari said said it was unknown how the man believed to have been attacked behaved around the sharks, but the public had a responsibility to recognize that it shouldn’t enter the waters and definitely should not touch or play with the sharks.One video shared by Israeli media showed a shark swimming right up to bathers in thigh-deep water.“What a huge shark!” the man filming exclaims, as the shark approaches him. “Whoa! He’s coming toward us!”“Don’t move!” he implores a boy standing nearby, who replies “I’m leaving.”The man then asks, “what, are you afraid of the sharks?”The behavior, some of which was witnessed by an Associated Press photographer two days before the attack, flew in the face of the Parks and Nature Authority’s advice not to approach the sharks.“Like every wild animal, the sharks’ behavior may be unpredictable,” the authority said in a statement.This would be just the third recorded shark attack in Israel, according to Yigael Ben-Ari, head of the Israel's Parks and Nature Authority's marine ranger force. One person was killed in an attack in the 1940s.The area, where warm water released by a nearby power plant flows into the sea, has for years attracted dozens of sharks between the months of October and May. Ben-Ari said swimming is prohibited in the area, but swimmers enter the water anyway.“It would have been appropriate to take steps to preserve and regulate public safety, but over the years chaos has developed in the area,” the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, an environmental group, said in a statement.It said fishermen, boats, divers, surfers and snorkelers intersected dangerously with a wild animal that “is not accustomed to being around crowds of people.”SPNI said further steps were needed to prevent similar incidents, like designating a safe zone from where people could view the sharks without swimming close to them.Israeli authorities on Monday closed the beach and others nearby.Goldenberg reported from Jerusalem.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Feb. 2025

Trump Cuts Threaten Key NOAA Work to Improve Weather Forecasts and Monitor Toxic Algal Blooms

The Trump administration has proposed gutting NOAA’s cooperative institutes, which study everything from improving lifesaving weather forecasts to monitoring fish stocks

CLIMATEWIRE | Researchers in Oklahoma are hard at work on a new lifesaving weather forecasting system. In Michigan, they’re keeping tabs on toxic algae blooms. In Florida, they’re studying tropical cyclones by flying into the hearts of hurricanes.These are just a handful of the hundreds of research projects ongoing at NOAA’s cooperative institutes, a network of 16 science consortiums involving 80 universities and research institutions across 33 states.But many CI scientists are worried their work — and their jobs — may soon be on the chopping block.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.A new proposal from the White House Office of Management and Budget would dramatically reorganize NOAA and gut most of its climate research programs in fiscal 2026. Part of that plan includes terminating funding for NOAA’s cooperative institutes and its 10 laboratories, which are heavily staffed by CI researchers.The plan, presented last week in an OMB document known as a “passback” memorandum, is technically still hypothetical. While passbacks typically outline the priorities eventually included in the White House’s budget proposal each fiscal year, Congress must ultimately approve the president’s request.But even if Congress rejects the cuts that the Trump administration proposes for fiscal 2026, experts worry that funding for the remainder of fiscal 2025 is still in question.“Once a certain amount of damage is done, it's not recoverable.” —Waleed Abdalati, director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES)Congress last month passed a continuing resolution to avert a shutdown and fund the government through the end of the current fiscal year. But the bill provides little guidance for agencies on how exactly they must use their funds.“The administration can largely move money however it wants within the agency,” said Waleed Abdalati, director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) housed at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “That's the authority Congress afforded them by not articulating more detail in its agency budgets.”In theory, some experts say, that means the Trump administration could direct agencies to shuffle their funds in ways that would diminish or eliminate programs previously funded in fiscal 2024.And the OMB passback suggests exactly that: directing NOAA to align its 2025 spending with the plan laid out in the memo — even though that proposal has not yet been approved by Congress.“OMB expects that the Department will exercise all allowable authorities and flexibilities to align the 2025 operating plans with the 2026 Passback,” the document states.There’s no indication that NOAA has yet complied. And it’s unclear whether this direction would legally sidestep Congress’ authority to direct the appropriation of funds.But if the agency began implementing the passback’s plan this year, a broad swath of programs could see their funding suddenly curtailed — including the cooperative institutes.Meanwhile, some CIs across the country have not yet received any of their 2025 funds. Some are still waiting on some of their 2024 money, due to a variety of payment delays. Meanwhile, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick — head of the agency that houses NOAA — is personally reviewing all funding commitments above $100,000.“The money is very slow in coming, and a number of institutes are at great risk of not having the funding after a couple months from now,” Abdalati said. “If that's the case, we’re required to either lay off or furlough people until the money comes.”Even if Congress restores funding for 2026, cuts and layoffs in the near term would be devastating, he added. Long-term datasets would be disrupted. Many staffers likely would seek new jobs, taking their knowledge and experience with them.“Once a certain amount of damage is done, it's not recoverable,” Abdalati said.Meanwhile, CI directors say even short-term interruptions in their research could threaten the safety of the communities they serve.CIGLR — the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research, housed at the University of Michigan — keeps tabs on toxic algae in lakes Erie and Huron, where nearby communities are well acquainted with the dangers. A harmful algal bloom sparked the Toledo water crisis of 2014, in which 400,000 residents in and around the Ohio city had no safe drinking water for two days.Eden Rogers, 13, uses a stick to try and scoop algae off the shoreline as the shadows of her sisters Brittany Rogers, 27, and Danielle Rogers, 24, with Danielle's toy Australian Shepherd, Barniby, walk the beach at Maumee Bay State Park in Oregon, Ohio on Sunday, August 3, 2014. The sisters, who grew up in the Toledo area, said they came to the beach to look at the Algae bloom, along the shore of Lake Erie, which has rendered the city of Toledo under a State of Emergency after a toxin from the algae polluted the city water supply rendering about 400,000 people in the Toledo area without useable water.Ty Wright for The Washington Post via Getty ImagesBut because of the ongoing funding delays, “we're looking at having to lay off a substantial number of our workers in the next few months,” said CIGLR director Gregory Dick.And it’s possible the institute will have to halt its algal monitoring program. If that’s the case, the region may be less equipped to predict and prepare for events such as the Toledo water crisis.“One of my big fears is that we'll be more vulnerable to such incidents,” Dick said, adding that the program “seems like it's in limbo — it's complete uncertainty.”From the sea to the skyThe cooperative institutes are one part of NOAA’s broader research ecosystem and just one of many proposed cuts across the department.The passback memo calls for the elimination of NOAA’s entire Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), which facilitates a variety of Earth system studies. Alongside the CIs, OAR houses 10 laboratories and a number of other programs including its global ocean observing and monitoring program; its ocean acidification program; and its Sea Grant program, which partners with 34 universities on marine research and education initiatives.But the CIs play a special role in NOAA science — and in its impact on U.S. communities — experts say.“The CIs are 50 percent of everything we do in research,” said Craig McLean, NOAA’s former top scientist. “They are of equal vitality and importance to the NOAA mission as every NOAA scientist — many of whom have come from the CIs.”The CIs exist via a particular type of federal funding award known as a cooperative agreement, which operates much like a grant but involves close collaboration with federal employees. Each agreement is awarded on a five-year basis, with the potential to renew for another five years. After that, universities must compete again for a new award.Still, many cooperative institutes have been around for decades — CIRES, the oldest and largest, was established in 1967. Many involve multiple university partners and employ dozens or hundreds of staff. And many maintain long-standing data collection programs with major impacts on human societies.CIMAR, for instance — the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research, housed at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa — monitors “basically the entire ecosystem of the tropical Pacific,” said its director, Douglas Luther. That includes everything from the life histories of marine animals to the ocean’s rising sea levels.And CIMERS at Oregon State University — the Cooperative Institute for Marine Ecosystem and Resources Studies — keeps tabs on everything from salmon stock in the Pacific Northwest to the movement of ships in the remote Arctic Ocean. It’s also active in ocean exploration, mapping parts of the seabed where methane reserves or critical minerals may be abundant.[The cuts represent a] "complete sabotaging of American weather forecasting. It would totally change the game in terms of our prediction.” —Marc Alessi, a science fellow with the Union of Concerned ScientistsThese studies help keep the U.S. competitive with other global science leaders, said CIMERS director Francis Chan.“There's a new science race going on,” he said. “People are thinking about what are the different ways of using the ocean.”Other CIs help improve the forecasting tools used by NOAA’s own National Weather Service.Scientists from the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies are key members of NOAA’s famed Hurricane Hunter missions, which fly specialized data-collecting aircraft through tropical cyclones.Meanwhile, scientists at the Cooperative Institute for Severe and High-Impact Weather Research and Operations (CIWRO), are developing products to help meteorologists spot dangerous weather events with more advance warning. One of these is Warn-on-Forecast, an experimental system designed to rapidly incorporate radar and satellite observations into a high-resolution model, producing updated forecasts about every 15 minutes.And it’s showing promise.As twisters whirled across the central U.S. last month, amid an outbreak that killed dozens in the Southeast and Midwest, Warn-on-Forecast predictions helped accurately predict a storm track in the Missouri Ozarks with about two hours of lead time, according to CIWRO’s director, Greg McFarquhar.The forecast, combined with other data, prompted National Weather Service staff to contact emergency managers on the evening of March 14 and warn them that long-track tornadoes may be forming. NWS followed up shortly afterward with a Special Weather Statement, narrowing down the tornado tracks to nearby Carter and Ripley counties.When a strong tornado touched down shortly afterward, more than 125 people already had checked in at a nearby Carter County shelter. There were no fatalities reported in the aftermath of the event.Traditional forecasting tools typically predict tornadoes with an average of only 13 minutes of advance warning, according to NOAA. The extra time afforded by new tools like Warn-on-Forecast “makes a huge difference in terms of people being able to get out of the way of these tornadoes,” McFarquhar said.‘A big loss to the American people’With funding delays dragging on and existential cuts looming, scientists say these research projects are all in jeopardy.Some CI directors told POLITICO's E&E News that their institutes likely would shut down without NOAA funding. Larger institutes like CIRES said they might continue to exist in a diminished form — but the loss of NOAA resources would take a huge toll.“We wouldn't be as robust,” said Abdalati, the CIRES director. “And honestly it would be, I think, a big loss to the American people — because we do things that matter, that are important.”Much of the Trump administration’s attacks on NOAA research center on climate science. The conservative policy blueprint Project 2025 referred to the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research as the "source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism” and called for much of its work to be dissolved — a plan reflected in the OMB passback memo.But CI scientists note their projects delve far beyond climate change research. And many have implications for the economy, national security and competition with countries such as China — priorities the Trump administration has claimed to support.“I think that's the part that worries me,” said Chan, the CIMERS director. “Are people making decisions because they don't have the full picture of what science is doing? If that's the case, we're open to providing information.”The cuts proposed in the OMB passback memo have sparked widespread backlash among science advocates.The American Meteorological Society warned in a statement that eliminating NOAA’s research arm would have “unknown — yet almost certainly disastrous — consequences for public safety and economic health.”The cuts represent a "complete sabotaging of American weather forecasting,” said Marc Alessi, a science fellow with the nonprofit advocacy organization Union of Concerned Scientists. “It would totally change the game in terms of our prediction.”Some lawmakers in Congress have raised similar concerns.Nine Democratic representatives from New Jersey submitted a letter last week to Lutnick decrying the proposed cuts, which they argued would endanger their state and its nearly 1,800 miles of coastline. They expressed particular concern about the proposed elimination of NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey. The lab is a leading developer of the atmosphere and ocean models that inform weather forecasts.“Without their work, Americans will not receive accurate weather or tidal predictions, impacting our safety, economy and national security,” the letter stated.Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado said in a statement to E&E News that worsening droughts and wildfires across the western United States mean that the "work our scientists and civil servants do at NOAA is essential to U.S. national security and the personal safety and daily lives of Americans.”Colorado is the only state to house two cooperative institutes, and it's home to the largest of the CIs.Despite these kinds of concerns, McLean, the former NOAA top scientist, said the response from Congress hasn’t gone far enough. Some CIs — like the extreme weather-focused institute in Oklahoma — are housed in red states, where Republicans in Congress have so far raised few objections to cuts at NOAA.“On the Republican side, they're cowering behind Trump's voice and they're not raising any alarm,” McLean said. “And they're going to watch many assets and attributes in their states go away.”Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2025. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.

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